Chapter 23 Fully Committed
Chapter twenty-three
Fully Committed
A silence fell over the room so heavy, so thick, Reiko felt it might crush her through the hairline cracks in the flooring.
Noemi was the cousin Santino had mentioned that had disappeared when he was young. The one they’d never found any traces of, so he had taken her as dead, though they hadn’t found evidence of that, either. She remembered the story easily, as it hadn’t been overly long since she’d heard it.
But even if he hadn’t made it clear then, it would be clear in the moment, the certainty of his mother’s words held a much harder impact than Santino’s personal presumption.
Santino’s grandfather, whose arm was thankfully being bandaged already and didn’t seem to be bleeding any longer, nearly knocked his medic off their feet as he swung toward Corinna. “No,” he exclaimed in a scratchy, rasping tone. “We never found—”
“She is, Papà,” Corinna said, as firmly as her emotional upset allowed. She still sat on the floor, as if she hadn’t found the strength to stand again, looking between her father and her son with a sort of palpable desperation Reiko couldn’t fully comprehend.
Except she could, she realized. That look on Corinna’s face was a pleading to be heard and understood.
“L-liar!” Adele cried.
Santino snapped something in Italian that had Adele promptly clamping her mouth shut. Or perhaps that was his crushing grip on her throat.
“I’m not,” Corinna said. “Lo … heard you, arguing about whether your sister’s remains might be found when a new casino was rumored to be coming to the river.”
Reiko lifted a hand to her mouth as she attempted to process the words, and the layers of pain behind them. If the woman Santino called Zia had loved all of her children, it must have torn her apart to learn she had been forced to grieve one at the hands of the others.
“No,” Nonno said again, weaker. “LoLo, why?”
All the woman on the hospital bed could do was continue to cry.
It was Santino, surprisingly, who answered. “She couldn’t bear the thought of losing the children she had left, so she decided it was her choice, as the mother, to keep the secret. That about sum it up?”
Corinna made a humming sound and wiped at her face.
“Noemi was ungrateful,” Adele said with a scoff. “She was going to throw it all away, anyway. All we did was help her stick to her ideals.”
Santino released a scornful sigh, like he was aggravated and disappointed all at once. In the next heartbeat, he’d jerked Adele forward and jammed his knee harshly into her ribcage. “Now we take this outside.”
He was trying so hard to spare his aunt from having to witness her daughter’s last moments.
It was noble in a twisted way, to Reiko’s mind.
But there was a greater flaw. She hated the thought of him bearing the burden of having wiped out both of his remaining cousins single-handedly.
He was angry for the time being. But in a month, or a year, the anger would fade.
If there had ever been good times, he would remember them, and he would mourn.
Would he trust her with those feelings? Or would those specific feelings be too complicated, too close to betrayal, for him to let her see them?
She didn’t want that to ever be a question. And since she had already made a rather unflattering first impression, Reiko decided her only priority needed to be in reassuring the man whose touch still warmed her skin.
She cast her eyes around the room, uncertain what she was even looking for until she spotted it.
A syringe on the floor, half rolled under the sofa beside where Adele had held Corinna at blade-point.
It didn’t look as though it had been depressed—the butt end was still extended—and she realized that had to be the needle Nonno had referenced when he’d done whatever he’d done to stop her.
Reiko moved before she could think it through, barely even processing the other movements around her. No one barred her way. No one even seemed to pay her attention until she was kneeling and lifting the medical instrument-turned-weapon from the floor.
Corinna mumbled something with the tone of an inquiry that fell on deaf ears.
Reiko didn’t sweep her eyes around the room to search out who was watching, let alone judging.
She verified that the object in her hand was a syringe with a pointy needle at the proper end, a plunger not yet fully depressed, and no visible contents where the liquid should be.
That meant air. She wasn’t medically inclined, but she didn’t live under a rock.
Santino and Armando were dragging his struggling cousin toward the exterior door, which a third man waited beside, holding open.
Reiko clutched her weapon carefully and scurried forward, darting around the one arm of one man who thought to try and stop her.
Someone else made a sound like protest when she moved, but she ignored them, too.
It wasn’t like she was going to hurt Santino.
She wanted to do the opposite. She wanted to help him, by not making him do the worst thing just one time.
She slipped just between him and the guy at the door and pulled up a smile. “Wait.”
Santino stilled immediately, twisting his upper body toward her with a raised brow. “Beautiful?”
Her smile became easier when she knew it shouldn’t. For as much as her intentions were good, she had no way to know how he’d receive them. The thought ought to have worried her more than it did. “You remember what I said earlier?”
“Kind of a hard conversation to forget,” he replied. His eyes crinkled. “But now’s not really the best time—”
“I know.” She eased closer, within reach, and noted even Adele seemed to be watching.
“I just meant…. You did so much for me, helping me out of that trouble with my family when you didn’t have to.
You could have handled that a dozen different ways and I would never have been angry.
But ‘family’ to me, and ‘family’ to you, have mostly been vastly different things.
” She pressed her free palm on his chest, never looking away from his eyes.
“I want to learn your way. I want you to teach me.” She drew a deep breath.
“I need you to know I’m in, committed, whatever the right way to say it is. To you, and then everything else.”
His lips lifted like he was amused but also confused and he said, “Baby, we pretty much covered this…” His voice trailed when she raised her other arm and finally turned her gaze to Adele. “Reiko.”
Adele saw the needle first, of course, and literally hissed at her before spouting what Reiko assumed were insults or threats in Italian based on the tone.
On Adele’s other side, Armando’s eyes went wide and he looked rapidly between the women and Santino, as visibly lost as Reiko had ever seen him.
She felt bad for that, but didn’t let it stop her.
If anyone was going to be hated for ending Adele, it needed to be her.
Most of the people in that room already had questionable-at-best opinions of her, anyway.
She could handle that. She could handle being hated, even.
What she could not do—would not do—was allow Santino to carry the weight of extinguishing the bloodline on an entire branch of his family tree.
They would share the burden together, just as she’d promised.
And with the men still helpfully holding Adele upright and mostly stationary, Reiko plunged the needle into the only surefire vein she could reach.
Blood seeped out from the rough, graceless entrance and Adele tensed, mouth opening on a soundless scream.
Reiko forced herself to look the woman in the eyes—the woman who’d driven her in a trunk from what would still become her home, helped in some way to strip and hogtie her, and spat racial insults at her in front of her fiancé—and depressed the plunger.
Santino dropped his hold on Adele, letting Armando take her weight and forcing Reiko to release the syringe lest it be ripped from Adele’s throat.
Then Reiko found herself spun into Santino, his hands ghosting over her as if she’d been hurt before cradling her face.
“You didn’t have to do that, beautiful. I would have—”
“I know you would have.” Reiko layered her hands over the backs of his and tuned out the spike in sobs and commotion around them as she stared into Santino’s eyes.
“But I promised to help you carry the burden, and this once, I saw a way I could do that literally. Except you would have refused if I’d asked first.”
His Adam’s Apple bobbed with a hard swallow and Santino pressed his lips to her forehead in a bruising kiss. “Aishiteru,” he murmured against her skin.
His first spoken word of Japanese.
Her heart melted at the gesture as much as the meaning, and she leaned into him, curling her arms around his torso for the lingering second he allowed the display.
“What,” Nonno gasped, his tone more ragged than ever, “what the hell just happened, Santino? Why did you allow this outsider—”
Santino exhaled, the sound more a tickle across her skin than a sound that greeted her eardrums, and straightened.
He turned them to face the room from their position as the backdoor quietly closed in the background.
His arm curved around her back, hand anchoring over her outer shoulder.
“This is my fiancée, not some outsider. No, this is not how I wanted you to meet, and yes, I’ll agree to proper introductions another time.
I think we’d all prefer that. But mind how you speak of her at all times, because she isn’t just my future. She is our future.”
An undefinable sound that tore at Reiko’s heart preceded the unmistakable tone of a warning chime from the heart monitor beside Lorenza’s bed. Sparing her would have been kinder.
Reiko’s attention was ripped away by movement in her peripheral—movement in front of them, as her head was turned. She looked forward again and nearly blanched to see Santino’s grandfather approaching.